Home Depot Pours Millions of Dollars Into Housing for Men and Women Veterans

In September, Home Depot volunteers in San Diego renovated a run-down group of buildings to create a new housing center for military veterans. In June, more than 200 Home Depot volunteers returned, this time with 175,000 pounds of material to spruce up the outside, adding a basketball court, a vegetable garden, and a barbecue area.

The Hawley Veterans Services Center is operated by Volunteers of America, which runs 25 housing programs for veterans in 20 states. The crush of Home Depot volunteers wearing the company’s signature orange shirts illustrates how well-positioned charities with national programs and volunteerism opportunities can hit it big when major corporations embark on new giving programs.

Volunteers of America and its affiliates have received $5.1-million from the Home Depot Foundation to improve housing for veterans in the past two and a half years, not counting labor and materials, like that provided in San Diego last month.

A Natural Choice

The Home Depot Foundation started making grants to charities that house veterans in 2011, after completing a previous $100-million commitment to affordable, environmentally friendly housing. The company expended its initial three-year, $30-million pledge in just a year and half. Last fall, it made another commitment of $50-million over five years. Barbara Banaszynski, who oversees Volunteers of America’s veterans program, says she believes that even more money may follow.

“This seems like a deep companywide commitment, not just a philanthropic gift,” Ms. Banaszynski says. “The hearts and souls of their associates have become involved.”

About 35,000 Home Depot employees are veterans, so the focus on veterans was immediately popular within the company. The company’s suppliers have also rallied around the cause, contributing more than half of the $100-million that the Home Depot Foundation has granted for veteran’s housing and other issues since 2011. Kelly Caffarelli, president of the Home Depot Foundation, says the foundation was also swayed by research showing that 1.4 million veterans live in poverty and that veterans are twice as likely to be homeless as other Americans.

“When we started looking at the statistics, I think that’s the one that gave the entire team pause,” she says. “That’s appalling and untenable.”

The foundation has made grants to support transitional shelters, to create permanent housing for people with mental illness or substance-abuse problems who need extra support, and to help ailing World War II veterans update their bathrooms and kitchens.

Grantees include Operation Homefront and the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund, which help injured veterans with home modifications and repair, and the Fisher House Foundation, which builds houses near VA hospitals where veterans’ relatives can stay for free.

Inspiring Clients

Volunteers of America is the foundation’s largest grantee, due to its national scale and its focus on the most vulnerable people, Ms. Caffarelli says.

Grant recipients say the money is only part of the appeal. Home Depot’s volunteers—many of whom are former plumbers, electricians, or contractors—are unusually effective, says Mike King, national president of Volunteers of America. “They don’t want to sit there and eat doughnuts and drink coffee,” he says. “They’ll show up at 7 in the morning and they’re going.”

The many veterans among the Home Depot employees also provide hope to the charity’s clients when volunteers show up to help, Ms. Banaszynski says. “They’re meeting people who have experienced the same things they have,” she says, “but who have been able to make it in a traditional workplace environment.”

The Home Depot Foundation and Volunteers of America are now focusing on ensuring that appropriate housing exists for women veterans—a timely issue given the current focus on the prevalence of sexual assault in the military. Women now make up 15 percent of the military, but apartment complexes set aside for veterans’ housing rarely feature separate halls for women.

“The system has been set up for single men, but women don’t feel comfortable living amid large groups of men,” Ms. Caffarelli says.